Recently, I have read two books relating to genocide and the historiography thereof. One, by Deborah Lipstadt, sheds a light on Holocaust deniers. The other book details the Armenian Genocide and America’s relationship to the events and the aftermath. As an amateur historian and an Armenian, both books hit the sweet spot in my brain, the context-longing spot. Along with those books, I recently discussed the concept of authority in relationship to credible sources in my class to prepare my students for a research project. To explain this, I used myself as an example, listing my qualifications and asking whether I would be an authority on a historical topic or something like microbiology. In combination, those two things prompted a long neglected desire to tell the story, the historical stories.
For the purpose of this post, I want to talk about two main aspects of “telling the story” for me. One, I wish to discuss how I have neglected something I love, historiography. Two, I want to talk about just how important and crucial it is to tell the story of the Armenian Genocide.
As I have described previously, I love history and always have. For as long as I can remember, discovering the story of what has gone before thrills me. At first, this love took the form of avid historical fiction consumption. Additionally, my favorite field trips, the ones I vividly remember to this day, took us to historical locations from the small, comparatively unimportant Walnut Grove Plantation to the large, more well-known Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg. The older I grew, the more I sought out the historical in the shape of museums near, like the Upstate History Museum to the far, like presidential libraries and the Smithsonian, and in the shape of historical locations, the places where history actually happened from the well known like Fort Sumpter to the little known like Forts Howell and Mitchel on Hilton Head Island, earthan-work forts established primarily for the protection of freed slaves of the island and the immediate area during the AMerican Civil War. That longing to go to those places, visit the locations where history happened spilled over into a desire to tell those stories and to tell them well.
This dovetails with my desire to write. The written appeals to me and has for quite some time. It serves as the best outlet for the crowded thoughts in my mind. I see things and long to tell the story. History holds so many stories both already told and so many more yet untold. While many see the pages of history as filled with battles, inventions, and famous dead white men, I see history as full ofthe interwoven stories of countless human lives, each with unimaginable value. Thus, any whitewashing or obfuscating of history galls me. To see that done with an aspect of history intimately connected with my heritage drives me all the more to tell the story.
Here the two veins of this post converge. The Armenian Genocide often falls through the cracks of history. I remember realizing in the sixth grade after the class read a short story about a Genocide survivor that my classmates knew nothing about something so common to my knowledge just as common to me as the fact that July 4th represents independence for the United States. I thought that just like everyone knows about the atrocities of the Holocaust, common knowledge should also include the Armenian Genocide. World wars in my mind came with a terribly tragic genocide. The older I grew, the more I discovered about the lack of common knowledge relating to the Genocide and that what little they knew got swept into the enormous and horrific death toll of the Great War and the Spanish flu, thus getting swept under the rug.
As I learned more about history, I began to wonder if my own perception of the Genocide had been distorted by the bitterness of the survivors who suffered the continued indignity of Turkish denial and coercion of public perception. Perhaps the Genocide did not rise to the terrible standard of the Holocaust although I continued to believe that these stories should be told. Just as people know of the Rwandan tribal genocide between Hutus and Tutsis and the Khmer Rouge killing fields under the regime of Pol Pot, people should know of the Young Turks xenophobic, genocidal desire to revive Pan-Turanism.
I did not linger in my hesitancy. Rather, I dove into detailed, sometimes tedious, research into the Genocide for my Masters’ Thesis. I read several accounts of the Genocide from Ambassador Morgenthau’s first hand memoir to the memoir of Garin Hovanesian, son of one of the most renowned historians of the Genocide. I learned that not only was my current perspective too generous but also that more horrors than I could have imagined occurred during the Genocide. Several years after completing my Masters’ Thesis, I walked through an exhibit on tattoos at the Field Museum in Chicago. I reached one point in the exhibit and stopped, chilled by the juxtaposition of two large photographs. One held the image of a grandson who had voluntarily tattooed his arm with the numbers forced on his grandmother by the Nazis. The adjoining wall held the photograph of an Armenian woman whose face had been tattooed by the Turks who ripped her from her home and forced her into sexual slavery while the rest of her family likely perished on a death march into the desert.
I stood there, arrested by the terrible similarity of those tattoos, arrested by the fact that before that moment, I knew nothing of those facial tattoos, a distinct and memorable part of the story, especially for that woman, nameless in a photograph in the Field Museum.
Last Sunday, the day I originally wrote this post, I finished the book “Starving Armenians,” the second of the two books that inspired this reflection. As the book wound down, it described the apathy of those that could help as it set in and left Armenia to a fate almost worse than death. I once again felt the compulsion to tell the story, to broadcast it as much as I am able. Lipstadt in her book, describes how many attempted to deny the Holocaust, succeeding in the fringes but ultimately failing. Each technique resonated with me as something that Armenian Genocide deniers employ with enormous success beginning all the way back at the creation of NATO and discussion of Turkey’s inclusion. Deniers win when no one tells the story. That will not be the case for me. I will continue to tell the story.